Legislation, scientific production and school practices on sex education in Brazil
Sex Education is always present at schools, even when it is unintentional and not systematized. This is because people’s sexuality accompanies them throughout their lives, from birth to death, and thrown out once they go through schools’ doors. At the same time, schools are not exempt from dealing with issues, taboos, prejudice and violence that permeate gender and sexuality. In fact, they produce inequalities insofar as they differentiate and categorize the people within them. However and at the same time, schools have the potential to be a space for reflection and deconstruction of prejudices and discrimination. For this, it is essential that formal Sex Education be held in schools transversally and in a lasting way. The main objective of this research is to deepen the understanding of how much the pedagogical practices in Sex Education in schools are aligned with what is recommended by the legislation and documents of the Ministry of Education that deal with the theme. Thus, our guiding question is “How do pedagogical practices in Sex Education occur and how do they relate to official documents of Education?”. The present research is being carried out in multipaper format, and is composed of three articles. Our partial considerations are that the research that teachers and professors are, yes, supported by law and official documents of the Ministry of Education to carry out practices of Sex Education in schools. However, there is no single, explicit document that can ratify this. Therefore, we believe that schools in the country will not be able to carry out integral, transversal and perennial Sex Education with students and families until there is a single and forceful legislation on it. In addition, it is necessary that Sex Education integrates the curricula of courses that offer a teacher training degree so that teachers in the country are able to deal with and feel prepared for classroom topics that concern Sex Education. Our hypothesis about what pedagogical practices are like is that they are far from being aligned with official documents, which propose guidelines for issues related to Sex Education. This is partly because those documents have gaps that make room for different interpretations. This scenario makes the practices of Sex Education in schools depend on the personal impetus of some teachers or the group of teachers, which makes them dispersed and punctual.